Plant the Sapling - dealing with hopelessness

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Content Warning: there are distressing references and links to the ongoing horrors in Gaza within the body of this post.

I have been bone tired for close to two weeks now. Dragging my feet. Finding every opportunity to burrow beneath my blankets. Shivering.

Ramadan, while physically demanding, is not usually like this. I typically start off tired, get used to the rhythm of fasting and get some steam, lose momentum, and then come in strong at the end.

I’m wondering how much of my physical exhaustion these days is psychosomatic, how much of it is my emotional exhaustion at the people dying on my phone manifesting in heavy limbs and eyelids.

I am trying not to internalize the helplessness I feel about Gaza, to keep calling keep writing keep sharing keep pressuring keep marching. I am trying to look for signs that the tide is turning:

• Canada, my home country, passed a motion in parliament in March that, while watered down, said more for Palestinian human rights and self-determination than anything our leaders have dared say before.

• A week earlier, Jonathan Glazer stood on stage at the Oscars and used his acceptance speech to refute his “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people”.

And yet, for every win, for every hard-fought recognition of Palestinians as human beings, just as deserving of safety and freedom as any other people, there has been horror after horror after horror.

In these last 10 days alone: The Al-Shifa hospital massacres and torching. News of the AI systems Israel has used to kill families in Gaza en masse in the coldest, most dystopian way you can imagine. World Central Kitchen aid workers killed in targeted drone strikes. The reaction of the slumbering global north, finally waking up now that the victims in Gaza are not exclusively brown. Whistleblowing doctors in Israeli prisons, holding kidnapped Palestinians, reporting on the most horrid of conditions. Picture after picture of child after child with white-phosphorous burned faces, amputated limbs, starved bodies nothing but skin and bone.

It’s hard to be hopeful. It’s hard to feel as though anything we do will actually make any difference. And yet.

When I was little, my father would often give the sermon at the community prayer for our celebrations the end of Ramadan. Every year, no matter how else his speech might change, he would include a portion on the importance of putting in the effort. Put in the effort, he would say, but leave the result to God.

I have never known how to leave the result. Being a perfectionist, an A + B = C thinker, I wanted full control.

But control is not the realm of us mere mortals, and the sooner we internalize that realization, the better off we’ll be. The truth is, I’m not calling and writing and pressuring and marching and sharing to make it stop. I want it to stop, of course, but I am not naïve enough to think that I can make change on my own. I’m doing these things because I need to do my part. Because it’s hard enough to live with the cruelty of this world, but it would be even harder to live with my indifference to that cruelty.

In one of my favourite hadeeths¹, Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, teaches us that if the world is ending, and you have a sapling in your hand, plant the sapling.

I make myself think about this hadeeth a lot. If the world is ending, no one will eat the fruit from this sapling. It will never have a chance to bear fruit, much less grow into a tree.

Is my fixation with seeing the results about centering what I’ve done to bring them about? Am I making myself the protagonist in a story where I am, at best, one of millions of tertiary characters?

Humans are naturally egocentric and impatient. Maybe what Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, was trying to tell us is that even the things we want most desperately will only come in God’s time. And that even when our part is miniscule, when no one else will notice it, God still sees it.

Photo by Eyoel Kahssay on Unsplash

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Let’s chat in the comments:

1. Are you a results-oriented person?

2. Do you have a hard time doing things if you don’t feel like you see an immediate change?

3. What do you do when you feel hopeless or helpless?

I’m continuing to share resources about Gaza and the West Bank. This week, I considered sharing a pile of resources about all the horrific, dystopian things that are happening - the AI killing system, the massacre at Al-Shifa hospital complex, the conditions that whistleblowing doctors have reported on in Israeli political prisoners where Gazans are held without charge, without trial, without recourse. You can find those resources linked in the main body of my post.

In this section, I’m sharing this post from back in November. It asks you to consider the lifecycle of one Palestinian child, based on real, credible facts and testimony collected and included in South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Please watch it until the end. Maybe the statistics are numbing us beyond the ability to act. Maybe a single story will move us to demand change.

leavecaricealone

A post shared by @leavecaricealone

1. A hadeeth is a report attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, describing his words and actions and representing the chief source for knowing his authoritative precedent (Sunna) https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195390155/obo-9780195390155-0030.xml#:~:text=A%20Hadith%20(Arabic%20plural%20aHadith,his%20authoritative%20precedent%20(Sunna).